I am a proud husband & father of three boys and the founder of an independent professional allocation timing service. My goal in founding TSP Smart Investor & Vanguard Smart Investor was to bring a simple-to-execute strategy to people who have more important matters in life than to follow the superfluous financial and investment news. I see my mission in life is to ensure my members do not soak up wall street's losses during the next bear market and of course obtaining the best retirement outcome.

After receiving a degree in investment finance, I chose to serve in the military and enjoyed 14 years flying fighters and 11 deployments with both the USAF and US Navy. I went on to earn my Masters in Organizational Leadership and served on the Joint Staff in the pentagon and as Chief of Current Operations Branch at NORAD HQ. While I enjoyed my missions in the Air Force, I always remained interested in economics and finance and found myself devoting my free time to understanding what really drives the markets.

After watching so many friends and highly intelligent colleagues struggle with investment decisions during the bear markets, I wanted to help. With over 20 years of investing experience and extensive training in operational analysis, I took the approach that much of facts put forth about investing are actually assumptions or biased opinions propagated by the financial industry. I needed eyes-on historical results and not sales pitches, black box analysis and antidotes. I took my research to a new level after I retired from the Air Force.

In developing my service, I adopt best practices and then research them thoroughly to see if improvements can be made. After extensive research I did just that with Sy Harding's Seasonal Timing Strategy. I found no other strategy did as well in both up & down markets and can be as easily applied to the Thrift Savings Plan funds. Our Seasonally-Modified Buy & Hold™ strategy provides exceptional historical risk-adjusted returns for core retirement funds requiring only two adjustments per year.

After developing our core strategy, I then turned my attention to the only area I believed could both improve our results and reduce risk further - avoiding bear markets and large market corrections. What I found talking to investors is there was another side to the investing coin - the fear of large losses kept many investors under-allocated to equities during the bull years. I can't blame them after the last two bear markets and the fact that you will always find perma-bears (and perma-bulls) in the financial media. And who really trusts wall street.

So while our core strategy historically does a good job in both markets, I also wanted to find objective measures for determining where we are in the market cycle. Our service focuses on market leading indicators from all angles - the economic fundamentals, technical analysis, the seasonal and event based tendencies of the market, as well as the sentiments of independent forward thinking market experts. We also focus on dismissing indications presented in the financial media that do not have leading historical correlations to market performance.

I enjoy providing our free Perspectives blog on investing that applies to anyone's retirement allocations in tax deferred accounts, not just TSP accounts. Since my goal is to bring these best practices to those who aren't interested in the daily financial noise, I created a very low cost e-mail only alert timing service with bi-annual market summaries. I provide other levels of service for those who need more information.

While I present some of my findings in our free blog, I provide actionable information to our members so they can make more informed decisions in a timely fashion. Our research paid off recently when we provided our members the following interim update on 18 August (five days later the market was down over 10%):

Market internals remain weak and have for some time. Aversion to risk as measured by credit spreads in the bond market have now reached levels that historically been met with significant market corrections ... in the stock market within weeks.

And remember, investing seems easy on the way up. But once you get near the top it gets tricky. It is important to get down safely. And as this little guy can attest to, you might want help from someone you trust not someone else trying to get on top. BTW, he asked for help in time.

I hope you give our service a try. I think you will see we are focused on what matters. And soon that means getting down safely.